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AWT and Swing Improvements in Mustang

Scott Violet visited Prague this week and he had a tech talk about improvements of AWT and Swing in Java SE 6 (Mustang). Some of these are pretty interesting and it wouldn't be me if I would not share the information (yes, I asked for permission first). Most of these features are already done, some are still being finalized for final release of Mustang.

Major news in AWT:

Desktop related APIs - these enable you to execute native actions such as to launch a browser, open a mail composer, open the file or print the file - all these actions are processed by applications which are associated with the file type. Thus you can easily print a PDF from Java using Adobe Acrobat.

Instant splash screen - a splash screen can be launched even before the VM machinery starts, it can be either specified on command line or launched programatically - and it can be dynamic (e.g. including a progress bar)

New modality API - modal dialogs are handeled in a better way - java help can be non-blocking, each document can have it's own modal dialogs, modal dialogs always stay on top, etc.

Major news in Swing:

Look and feel improvements - great look of Java on the upcoming Windows Vista and better GTK (with more general support for themes)

SwingWorker - utility which makes Swing threading easier, now a part of Swing

Layout enhancements - most of the stuff comes from Matisse - baseline support supported on almost all components

True double buffering - no more "gray rect" bug - the second buffer is used for repainting, so Java apps look more native

Alltogether, there are many nice improvements for Java desktop applications. Scott has also shown us the APIs and they seem pretty simple to use. I hope that the AWT & Swing developers won't slow down, now that Swing is the dominant GUI toolkit - I hope to see even more in Java SE 7 - Dolphin.

Well, this thing with Duke was just an experiment... I guess this is a kind of feedback I needed to have to get back to it. My plan is to do Duke once or twice a week, well, as long as I get enough inspiration to come up with anything I consider as least a bit funny.

Is there an 'unoffical' date for Mustang ? (Java 6)
The font, synth(l&f), grey rect etc.. Are the main fixes I am after...
I just hope its not held till MID 2006..
If it is. A 1.5_06 ? With font, synth, rect fixes would be nice..